Petrol in Canggu: Pertamina vs bottles

Fuel is the first thing you solve alone. Handover covers documents, helmets and where the STNK lives, and then you ride off with a tank someone else filled. A day or two later the gauge drops and you see two things on the same street: a proper Pertamina station, and a rack of bottles outside someone's house.

Only one of them is allowed on our bikes. Fill at a petrol station. Our fleet is fuel-injected and sensitive to fuel quality, so refuelling from roadside bottles is not permitted on a Treasure rental.

Treasure Bike Rental is a motorcycle shop on Jalan Raya Padonan in Tibubeneng, Canggu. This is what we tell guests at the counter about petrol for a Bali motorcycle, in plain language, so the first fill is not a guessing game. Our fleet is geared motorcycles and the routine below is the same on all of them — only the tank size changes between a 150 and a 250.

Pertamina vs roadside bottles

Pertamina is the state fuel network and the sign you will see most around Canggu and the wider Kerobokan area. Stations are marked SPBU. A few private-brand stations exist on the bigger roads, but the default is Pertamina.

At a Pertamina station

You do not fuel the bike yourself. An attendant does it while you sit or stand beside the bike. Bigger stations have a separate motorcycle lane — join that one rather than queueing behind cars.

The grades on the pump:

• Pertalite (RON 90) — the cheaper subsidised grade, widely used
• Pertamax (RON 92) — the normal choice for modern injected engines
• Pertamax Turbo (RON 98) — higher octane, not required for our fleet

For a fuel-injected 150–250cc motorcycle, Pertamax or higher is the sensible default. The difference across a full tank is small money; a rough-running engine on a rainy Tuesday is not. If you are unsure which grade your unit takes, ask at handover.

Two practical details. Some bikes have a key-locked fuel cap, so know where yours is and which key opens it before you pull up to the pump. And engine off while fuelling — the attendant will remind you if you forget.

Stations on the main roads keep long hours; the small ones on back lanes close earlier and occasionally run dry at the end of a busy day. Queues build in the late afternoon and the minute rain starts, which is exactly when you do not want to be sitting in one. A mid-morning fill takes about three minutes.

Bensin botol: the Canggu bottle rack

Bensin botol — bottled petrol — is the rack of one-litre bottles or the small hand-cranked Pertamini cabinet you pass on every villa lane. You will see it everywhere, locals use it, and it looks like a shortcut when the gauge is low.

It is fuel with no guarantees:

• the grade is whatever the seller bought, usually the cheapest
• reused containers pick up water and dirt, and both end up in your tank
• a "litre" is measured by eye, not by a meter
• the price per litre is higher than the station rate

On an old carburettor scooter that is a survivable gamble. Our bikes are fuel-injected: the fuel pump, filter and injectors are the parts that suffer first, and a bad fill shows up as rough running, a flat spot under throttle, or a workshop job that costs many times the litre you saved.

And that bill is yours. Damage to the fuel system caused by the fuel you put in is the renter's responsibility under the rental — which is the whole reason this page is more insistent about petrol than about anything else.

Full tank language

The whole transaction is four or five words, and they are worth learning before you need them.

• Bensin — petrol. Solar — diesel. Never mix these up; solar in a petrol bike is a tow and a workshop bill.
• "Pertamax, full ya" — Pertamax, fill it up. Add Pak or Bu to be polite.
• "Dari nol ya" — from zero, please. Ask this before the attendant starts and watch the display reset. It is normal, not rude.
• "Lima puluh ribu" — fifty thousand. Fuelling by amount instead of by tank is common and perfectly fine.
• "Berapa?" — how much? — at the end, if you did not watch the total.

Watching the pump zero is the one habit worth keeping. Errors at busy stations are usually honest — a total left over from the bike in front — but they are easier to prevent than to unwind in two languages.

Cash always works. Many stations take QRIS through an Indonesian e-wallet or banking app, some take cards, and bottle sellers take cash only. Keep small notes somewhere you can reach with a helmet on.

If the wrong fuel goes in

It is rare and it is always the same sentence: solar went in instead of bensin. Diesel in a petrol engine is not a ride-it-gently-home problem.

Do not start the engine and do not ride the bike. If it is already running, switch it off. Diesel sitting in the tank is a drain job; diesel pumped through the filter and the injectors is a far bigger one. A bike with diesel in it does not get ridden anywhere — including to us.

Then:

1. Call us. Inside shop hours, Monday to Saturday 09:00–17:00 WITA, that is the fastest route.
2. Outside hours, leave the bike at the station and message us. If a workshop nearby can drain the tank, we will usually say yes — but get that in writing from us first, because the rental agreement does not allow any work on the motorcycle without our prior written approval.
3. Moving it means a tow truck — to that workshop or to our garage, whichever is closer and simpler.

Draining and recovery are at the renter's cost. Telling us early does not change whose bill it is, but it does keep it small: a bike that gets started and ridden on diesel turns a tank drain into a fuel-system repair.

The same applies to any fill that leaves the bike running rough afterwards. Tell us on the day. A bike reported early is a workshop booking; a bike reported at handback is an argument about who put what in the tank.

Fuel level on return

Fuel is the renter's job during the rental. The bike leaves the shop at an agreed level, and we ask for the same level back.

Get this right and it is a non-event. Get it wrong and it becomes a line on the return. Your rental agreement charges the fuel difference plus a service fee, taken from the deposit — in practice around the equivalent of IDR 30,000 per litre. It is assessed per bike rather than from a fixed table, because tank capacity and gauge markings differ between models: one bar on a 12-litre tank is not one bar on a 17-litre one. The wording is in the terms.

It is also the most avoidable charge in the whole rental.

Three things that keep it simple:

1. Confirm the level at handover. Ask what it is, look at the gauge, and say it out loud with the person handing you the bike. Do it at villa delivery too, not only at the shop.
2. Fuel on the way back, not on the day of departure. Airport mornings run late. A station stop the evening before costs you ten minutes and nothing else.
3. Never top up from a bottle to bring the gauge back up. Bottle fuel is not permitted on our bikes, and a few litres of unknown grade bought to avoid a small charge is how a cheap return becomes an injector clean.

Monthly riders have the same rule and more chances to break it. Make the station stop part of the week from day one; a bike that has only ever drunk station fuel is a much shorter conversation if it does end up in the workshop.

If you are returning outside shop hours, or you are not sure whether you have time for a station stop, message us first. Sorting it in chat is faster than sorting it at the counter.

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Before your first fill

Most guests overthink fuel and underthink range. A full tank on our bikes covers several days of normal Canggu riding, and an Uluwatu day trip still leaves you with fuel to get home. Plan the station stop while the gauge is still comfortable — that one habit is what keeps the bottle rack from ever looking like an option.

If this is your first time riding here, the fuel stop is the easy part — traffic, sand and rain take more attention, and first ride in Bali traffic covers those. The Canggu rental hub covers pickup, documents and delivery, and the Tibubeneng shop page has the address and map pin for the station-and-return loop.

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